Friday, July 03, 2015

Well that was certainly cathartic.For a show that has traded so heavily in subverting expectations, in
denying easy resolutions, in portraying Hannibal Lecter in almost superhuman
fashion, always several steps ahead of his pursuers….well, even though he
walked away at episode’s end, Jack Crawford’s royal ass-kicking of everyone’s
favorite urbane cannibal certainly provided an emotional payoff a long time
coming.Granted, the plot trajectory
that Bryan Fuller has crafted for this season, with Francis Dolarhyde and the
rising of the Red Dragon waiting in the wings, would seem to dictate that
Hannibal’s time as a free man is limited at best (although that all could
change.)But still, departing from the
traditional Lecterverse mythology to give Jack his great moment of revenge (for
his near-murder, for extending Bella’s pain, for destroying his life) is an
altogether valedictory and sweet experience.Even if you never want to see Mads Mikkelsen trapped in the confines of
Frederick Chilton’s house of horrors.

Like so many moments in Hannibal, this climactic confrontation
plays off of pre-existing cultural associations to evoke a feeling in the
audience that is both nostalgic and immediate (which also reflects on the increasing
temporal dissonance of the plotting.)Jack
and Hannibal’s epic slugfest is set to Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie”, which
will always possess a certain resonance with many as the theme song for the
opening symphony of brutality in A
Clockwork Orange (another work involving a man who gains great satisfaction
from the combination of classical music and graphic violence.)Thomas Harris and Ridley Scott devotees can
spy an almost direct recreation of Rinaldo Pazzi’s death from the Silence of the Lambs sequel (itself a
recreation of an infamous public gutting from the Pazzi heritage), but that
feeling of recognition is immediately derailed when Jack shows up on the
scene.And, of course, there’s the scene’s
most obvious feature: its invocation of the Jack-Hannibal brawl at Casa de
Lecter that closed out Season 2’s “Mizumono.”

Much of this storytelling
methodology is foreshadowed several scenes earlier, when Hannibal notes to
Bedelia that he prefers the immediacy of the harpsichord over the piano that he
must play in their apartment, that “the piano has the quality of memory”.This leads him into divulging to her both his
past with Pazzi and his knowledge of Mason Verger’s bounty on his head.And maybe this progression is key to
understanding something deeper about his character.So many of the players in Hannibal’s world
(and especially in Season 3) are torn between the past and present, wandering
in an emotional and psychological netherworld in which they resemble the dead,
no longer able to exist outside of that which has scarred them.Bedelia herself plays the part of Hannibal’s
wife while still clinging onto the clinical mindset of her psychiatric career;
the resulting conflict traps her in a state of paralysis on all fronts.Mason and Alana forge an unholy alliance
predicated on revenge for the scars that Hannibal has inflicted upon them, but
they seem to have no existence in the present world in which they reside.

And there’s Will Graham, by the
far the ultimate case study in the paralysis borne of a mind trapped between
the past and present.His entire
character arc in the show has been predicated upon running from the guilt of
his past failures and the fantasies of his empathic visions, while still trying
to forge a semblance of normalcy in the waking world.In the first four episodes of this season,
much has been made of his status as a dead man voyaging through the land of the
living, his sole purpose of killing Hannibal clouding his mind with visions of
Abigail Hobbs and preoccupying him so much with Chiyoh as a partner in crime
that he fails to see her complicity with her old cannibal charge (resulting in
his tossing from their train and reunion with the nightmare stag.)As Hannibal tells Bedelia early in the
episode “Will has reached a state of moral dumbfoundedness.”And as Chiyoh so accurately diagnoses in
their train car “If you don’t kill him (Hannibal), you are afraid you’re going
to become him.”Moral and ethical
ambiguity are what make the show so oblique and fascinating, but in this case,
Jack’s certitude about his revenge ethos give him an easier path to payback
than the twisted one that Will embarks upon.

This is where Hannibal seems to
rise above the rest of the players.Even
as predatorial forces encircle him, he remains sanguine about the role that his
past serves in shaping his present.A relative
lack of empathy will do that for you.But there’s also an almost Dr. Manhattan-like quality about the
perspective that he holds over his life.The reason why he’s been able to constantly stay so far ahead of his
pursuers must be partly attributed to his ability to consolidate all times and
experiences of his life into one viewpoint, acknowledging them all while still
relentlessly moving ahead, a shark in the muddled psychological waters that
cloud the vision of so many others.

Which is why Jack’s revenge gains
such immediate traction in this episode.Will wants to circle his prey, tapping into his past, understanding his
motivations before moving in (there’s also a sense that he needs more
convincing to go through with it.)Mason
and Alana want to counter Hanibal’s murder tableaus by enmeshing him in their
own version, but that involves multiple levels of planning and
bureaucracy.But Jack merely desires the
intimacy of revenge that allows him to take a direct line toward him.And following last week’s “Apertivo”, which
played so heavily around the literal and figurative shatterings of the main
players’ lives, this time its Hannibal who is shattered, tossed through several
sheets of glass, arm crushed in an antique wheel, ego bruised even as he tries
to goad Jack into further violence and retribution. (It’s also interesting that
Jack tosses his wedding ring into the river, evoking more of the drowning
imagery that has dominated this season, yet this time serving as a moment of
power rather than futility.)

Where this plot progression leads
the show next week….well, that’s a great question.Traditional Lecter lore dictates that
Hannibal must end up in Mason’s estate to be dangled above the man-eating pigs,
only to be saved by Clarice Starling.But despite hewing close to that tradition in many instances, Bryan
Fuller has displayed no qualms about handily manipulating it as well.And after all, Will Graham is still wandering
down those train tracks….

Leftovers ahead on the right:

*As acclaimed Rossini scholar
(and author of the forthcoming book Why
Cordell Matters: The Mason Verger in Us All) Lillian Tyack noted on Twitter
tonight “Fuller’s use of ‘The Thieving Magpie’ also offers a direct commentary
on the scene at hand, as Pazzi tries to steal Hannibal’s knife, and Hannibal
steals Pazzi’s life.”And who am I to
argue with her?

*Brian Reitzell’s ever-evolving
score remains a high point in the Hannibal
experience.During several instances in “Contorno”
(notably when Will falls from the train), he throws in a bubbling, gurgling
tonal soundscape that almost sounds like a distorted Moog.Reitzell’s sound procuring process is always
unpredictable and intriguing, so it’ll be interesting to eventually read about
his methods for this go around.

* “There are means of influence
other than violence…but violence is what you understand.” (Chiyoh, to Will,
before tossing him from the train car.Hmmm…maybe her complicity with Hannibal is more a matter of trying to
give Will a little tough love in redirecting him toward his ultimate goal.)

*Censor-defying moment of the
week: Mason noting to Alan that she’s tasted more of Hannibal than everyone
else, and that “Spitters are quitters, and you don’t strike me as a quitter”. That’s the second oral sex joke that’s flown
under the radar this season (after Bedelia’s dinner time quip in the premiere
about how her husband prefers her to taste a certain way.)

*More reason why Hannibal is too intelligent and daring
of a show for the network landscape?And
episode that climaxes in a satisfying fight opens with an extended conversation
about snails surviving in the stomachs of birds, and how this reflects the
complex nature of finding one’s true purpose in life.Sigh…..gets my synapses firing in all sorts
of gratifying ways.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

In
which the dead…the dead at least have the luxury of being done with what they
lost.

“Not
all our choices are consciously calculated.” (Will)

Four episodes into Hannibal’s third season, it’s become
readily obvious that there’s no escaping the events of Season 2’s final salvo, “Mizumono”,
no healing from the Lecter House Massacre aside from the various layers of psychological
scar tissue that each victim has formed (the physical manifestation of which
Cordell so delights in describing to Mason.)In total, those first two seasons formed a closed circle of trauma and
violence, the apocalypse at Garret Jacob Hobbs’s residence looping back on
itself in the final confrontation between Will and Hannibal.And with that circle closed, its main actor
abandoned the hermetically sealed murderworld that he created, leaving his
victims trapped within, gazing out toward him while choking on the fetid air on
which they were left to subsist.

Or maybe that closed circle
actually formed around the glass ceiling of sanity under which Will, Jack,
Alana, etc. precipitously hovered, its pressure finally shattering that barrier
into a million pieces and sending the players crashing back down to the
bottom.Shattered glass, shatterings of
all sorts are a prominent motif in “Mizumono”, and they’ve continued to recur
in Season 3, especially in “Apertivo”, which beckons the plot back in time to
fill in the blanks between the events of last season and Will’s search for
Hannibal in Italy.The opening flashback
to Frederick Chilton’s near assassination by Miriam Lass features not only the
shattering of the interrogation room window by her bullet, but the grotesque
rupturing of the back of his head, the blood spatter from which drenches the
screen before subsiding to reveal the reconstructed, yet still fundamentally
broken, Chilton of today.The flashback
to Hannibal’s gutting of Will (which is becoming the central and defining trauma
of his life, replacing that of his murder of Garret Hobbs) includes an interior
close up(!) of the rupturing of his stomach.Of course, Alana’s iconic plunge in “Mizumono”, seen here again, sent
her crashing through the second story window of Casa de Lecter, her prone and
broken body left to absorb a cascade of glass and rain.Jack’s flirtation with death comes courtesy
of a shard of glass embedded in his neck and Mason Verger’s fate is sealed by
his drug-induced rupturing of his face and Hannibal’s shattering of his spine.

It’s a great indicator of the
chaotic, deformed world of this season that the returning Chilton serves as the
guide who attempts to bring these characters back from their state of spiritual
disembodiment.But, well….Humpty Dumpty
and all.There’s no real returning to
the land of the living for these members of the walking dead.As Chilton tells Will “The optimist believes
we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is
true.This is your best possible world,
Will.Not getting a better one.”Like Hannibal’s other victims, his
motivations are driven by revenge most personal, an inversion of Lecter’s methodology
of elevating his victims into transcendence via his murder tableaus.Chilton’s desire is to drag Hannibal back
down into his torture dungeon, to exert command over him once and for all.Alana, with bone marrow in her blood,
transforms herself from the show’s beacon on optimistic goodness into a femme
fatale, her dark sexuality seemingly a weapon at the service of punishing
Hannibal for his sexual manipulation of her, a means, as she notes to Mason, to
“get him to the stage” of the Verger-designed theatre of his death.Jack’s drive to abandon the pain of his FBI
life following Bella’s death is derailed by Hannibal’s conciliatory note, which
draws him to once again serve as protector to Will, to see their original
mission completed this time.

“Oh
wrangling schools, that search what fire

Shall
burn this world, had none the wit

Unto
this knowledge to aspire,

That
this her fever might be it ?”

(“A
Fever”/John Donne)

This excerpt from Donne’s poem
about a long lost love serves as Hannibal’s elegy to Bella in his card.It also encapsulates so much of the tone of
this season, as characters are driven by a fever of madness and despair for the
death of their former lives.Nowhere is
this stronger than in Will’s vision quest toward…what?As he notes in the quotation that opens this
essay, logic and reason went out the window a long time ago.In a week in which Hannibal was felled by the low ratings-driven axe wielded by NBC
(alternate destinations for a prospective Season 4 remain), this quote also
encapsulates so much of what is inscrutably sticky and phenomenal about this
show.Its distortion of temporal solidity
and its willingness to wade into moral and ethical ambiguity (especially in
relation to its ostensible protagonist) take it to places that most televisual
works dare not tread.And its desire to
trace the outer limits of free associative psychology, both in its characters
and its formal style, presents often daunting challenge to the viewer.A network horror drama gains much of its
allure from the hero’s search for order amidst the chaos; when that hero slowly
begins to embrace the chaos, to enter a dark romance with it, where does that
leave the viewer?Bryan Fuller would
likely argue that this is the whole point, that falling into the chaos can be a
liberating experience for the audience.But the discomfort that results from a viewership weaned on plot-driven
narratives probably prevents much of that from happening on a mass scale.

Will’s long-standing fear of
plunging into these liminal depths was what drove him to near-madness in the
first two seasons.But his passage
through Hannibal’s underworld, and his passionate embrace of death, has left
him without the restrictions of that thought process.He appears to be psychologically freestyling
through his days, moving inextricably towards a return cycle in Hannibal’s
orbit (as Chilton so succinctly puts it).And it’s this sense of freedom, this exploration of the Freudian death
wish, that makes him just as much of an unwitting pawn as he was at his
Encephalitis-plagued nadir.The
revenge-driven quartet of Chilton, Alana, Mason, and Jack all seem to be
pushing Will back out into the stream of life, bait once again for the big
catch that is Hannibal Lecter.What they
might not fully realize is the extent to which they might follow him out into
that stream, and maybe how far they’ve already drifted away from the shore of
reality and sanity.After all, Hannibal was the one who left Will just whole
enough to live another day….

Leftovers aplenty this week:

*Will’s fantasy vision of he and
Hannibal garroting Jack at the dinner table is scored to Edward Grieg’s The Death of Ase, from his suite to
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.It’s stirring material, but there’s also a
bit of Peer Gynt’s vagabond ways about both Hannibal and Will.Act One of the play sets up Peer’s story, and
much like Hannibal’s second season,
Act Two features the main character descending into a fantasy world, before
becoming an outcast/outlaw in Act Three.

*Joe Anderson takes over for
Michael Pitt as Mason Verger…which is probably the best timed actor transition
in recent history, the latex skin-grafted face he now wears erasing most
obvious demarcations of such a change.Mason’s quasi-religious conversion is fascinating stuff.His view of himself as being in league with
Christ, especially in the context of Hannibal as fallen angel (which Bryan
Fuller has remarked upon in the past), forms a world in which the Verger estate
becomes the Heaven to which this seraphim must be drawn back into.Talk about every cop is a criminal, and all
the sinners saints…

*Glenn Fleshler debuts here as
Cordell.In an amusing twist, he also
played George Remus across several seasons of Boardwalk Empire, including a stint in Season 2 in which he did
business with Jimmy Darmody…who was played by former Mason Michael Pitt.

*It’s great to see Raul Esparza
back as Chilton, his perpetual smarminess tamed here by an obsession with payback
for the deformation of his body and soul.The moment of unmasking that he and Mason share (“You show me yours, I’ll
show you mine”) is, in keeping with the show’s twisted tone, both grotesque and
mildly kinky.

*Once again, DP James Hawkinson
creates a stunning visual landscape for this episode.He continues to use rack focus to separate
characters in the frame’s field of depth, but here he also utilizes several
crossfades between the profiles of several actors.The effect is once again to simultaneously
unite these visages in the frame, while showing how truly, figuratively distant
they are from each other.

*“The riot of lilacs in the wind
smells nothing at all like the stockyards and slaughterhouses one usually
associates with the Verger name.” (Margot, to Alana)

*”You see, I’m free Dr.
Bloom.I’m right with the Risen Jesus,
and it’s all okay now.And nobody beats
the Riz.He will rise me up and smite
mine enemies and I shall hear the lamentations of their women.” (Mason,
paraphrasing his lines to Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris’s Hannibal)